The Kitchen Boy by Robert Alexander Page A

I had to. I hadn’t ever been searched leaving The House of Special Purpose, not ever, but I still had to be careful. So I started pulling up my shirt, then stopped. The Empress, who’d been watching me from her post in the doorway, quickly turned away. I glanced briefly at Aleksei Nikolaevich, who was playing with a toy boat with a little wire chain, and then I lowered my pants and stuck the envelope into my undergarments.
    “Molodets,”
good lad, Nikolai Aleksandrovich said, brushing at his mustaches and looking at me with those generous eyes of his.
    No sooner had I buttoned my pants than Nikolai Aleksandrovich handed me a second sheet of paper, this one folded simply in two with no envelope. He said, “Now, Leonka, I want you to carry this letter in your hand, and I want you to show it to the guards should they ask. Open it up, go ahead, read it.”
    “Now?” I asked.
    “Da, konyechno.”
Yes, of course.
    Although I had received very little formal education, I was able to read, unlike most of the people in Russia at that time.
     
    Dear Sisters,
     
    Thank you for the
chetvert
of milk and the fresh eggs, which The Little One greatly enjoyed. We are in need of some thread and Nikolai Aleksandrovich would be grateful for some tobacco, if this would not be too difficult.
     
    May God be with you, A.F.
     
    Nikolai was a terrible smoker, he was. Always smoking. Frankly if the
Bolsheviki
hadn’t killed him he probably would have soon died of lung cancer. And Aleksandra Fyodorovna and her girls did in fact need thread. They had consumed great quantities of it, not merely because the Empress was now darning the Emperor’s socks and pants, not simply because she and the girls were mending all of their own clothes, but because right up to the end they were secretly stitching all of their “medicines,” as they called their secret cache of diamonds, into their undergarments. I still don’t understand how they’d kept nineteen pounds of gems secret up to that point – perhaps hidden in the corners of their suitcases? – but in the end they stashed over 42,000 carats of diamonds into the girls’ corsets. Other gems, such as rubies and emeralds, disappeared into their buttons and the men’s forage caps, while whole ropes of the most astounding pearls vanished into the waist and sleeves of Aleksandra Fyodorovna’s dress. Later, when the
Bolsheviki
were hacking apart the Empress, they found those pearls too. Entire ropes made of hundreds of pearls, just one of which was valuable enough to feed a family of peasants for a year.
    Oh, what a mistake, how they suffered because of Aleksandra’s devious needle…
    And the Tsar said to me, “On your way to the Soviet, I want you to stop by the Church of the Ascension. You might even tell the guards that you are taking this note there. Go right ahead and show it to them. Tell them that you are dropping this note off at the church so that one of the deacons will take it to the sisters at the monastery. When you reach the church, however, I want you to ask for Father Storozhev. You must speak to him and no one else but him, Leonka. And when you are alone with the Father you give him this note and also the envelope. He will make sure it is delivered to the correct people.”
    For a while, then, I was no longer Leonka, the kitchen boy, but the Tsar’s spy. And what did the note say? And the map, what did it show? Those have been preserved as well. They too have been kept all these years in the
arkhivy
in Moscow. All the notes to the Romanovs were in French, as were all the replies from the royal captives. Nikolai himself always passed the letters to me, but they were not his handwriting. It is the florid hand of a girl, that of Olga, the oldest grand duchess, for she was the most capable in French.
    And the first reply reads:
     
    From the corner up to the balcony there are 5 windows on the street side, 2 on the square. All of the windows are glued shut and painted white. The